Nicolai N. Petro — The Surprising Allure of Russian Soft Power

The six Russian national security documents issued since Putin first became president in 2000 display a remarkable conceptual consistency.1
They argue that a polycentric world is emerging and shifting the balance of power from the West to the Asia-Pacific region.2The West is attempting to prevent this, according to Russia, and this will mean greater competition over values and less cooperation in combating global threats like migration, pandemics, global warming and resource scarcity. Unless the West alters course from confrontation to cooperation, the result will be chaos in the international system, which would be very bad for Russia.3
To provide greater global stability, Russia intends to pursue "an open, rational, and pragmatic foreign policy, eliminating the need for expensive confrontation in, among other things, a new arms race." Russia's objective is to "gain as many equal partners as it can, in as many regions of the globe."

Finally, Russia sees "returning to one's roots," as a global trend, especially in the Middle East and North Africa. If other civilizations respond to this by trying to impose their own values, a clash of civilizations is all but inevitable. Partnership among civilizations, rather than conflict, is much to be desired, but it would require a common framework of values. Fortunately, says Russia, such a framework can be found in the world's major religions.

A careful reading of these documents, the most authoritative statements of Russia's worldview publicly available, challenges several common Western assumptions....

The rejected assumptions are based on liberal fundamentalism.

Russia thus sees itself as that part of the West that perceives liberal fundamentalism as futile and seeks to establish a framework of global leadership around the values that the West shares with non-Western states. Prominent political theorist Boris Mezhuev has dubbed this approach "civilizational realism."

Civilizational realism differs from classical realism in that it recognizes the importance of values in international affairs. It differs from classical liberalism in that it sees value in the diversity of cultural communities, as well as individuals. Russia's approach can therefore best be described not as opposition to liberalism, but as a different form of liberalism, one that is divorced from Western hegemony and open to non-western traditions and influences....

Interestingly, President Xi is reviving Confucianism, and Putin is allied with the Russian Orthodox Church and also welcoming of the many other traditional religions in Russia.

Traditionalism is being pitted against liberalism after the fall of fascism and communism, as Alexander Dugin projected in The Fourth Political Theory.

There are two forms of traditionalism. One holds that a particular tradition is "right" and all others "wrong." The other values all traditions as facets of the same gem. The former is dogmatic traditionalism and the later is liberal traditionalism. Liberal fundamentalism is dogmatic.

American Diplomacy
The Surprising Allure of Russian Soft Power

Nicolai N. Petro | Silvia-Chandley Professor of Peace Studies and Nonviolence at the University of Rhode Island. As a Council on Foreign Relations fellow, he served as special assistant for policy toward the Soviet Union in the U.S. Department of State from 1989 to 1990.

Gordon M. Hahn — Implications of Pew Study on “Major Threat” Perceptions Around the Globe

Recent Pew research surveys conducted in 38 and 30 countries, respectively, across the globe suggest the following troubling trends for Washington: American hegemony is waning; Russian public diplomacy may be making some inroads in many countries, including some NATO countries, the world is increasingly split apart between the West (plus Japan) and all the rest, and the effectiveness of China’s ‘quiet rise’ economy- and trade-based foreign policy.…

US soft power in decline.

The major problem of the US involves credibility. The US is defending the outer reaches of the empire as well as attempting to extend its borders. This clearly has nothing to do with national security or national defense in the minds of much of the world, including many Americans, and not only America Firsters.

Russian and Eurasian Politics
Implications of Pew Study on “Major Threat” Perceptions Around the GlobeGordon M. Hahn, analyst and Advisory Board member at Geostrategic Forecasting Corporation, member of the Executive Advisory Board at the American Institute of Geostrategy, a contributing expert for Russia Direct, a senior researcher at the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies, Akribis Group, and; and an analyst and consultant for Russia – Other Points of View

Paul Robinson — It’s only propaganda when they do it

The same is being said in the US about China and its government-sponsored Confucius Institute as Russian "soft power." See The Diplomat, China's Confucius Institutes and the Soft War and The price of Confucius Institutes at The Washington Post.

What Paul Robinson doesn't mention is that the US has been doing this globally for decades through NGOs that are least partially government-funded if not entirely, such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Moreover, there are indication that these NGOs are CIA front-organization. See Robert Parry, CIA’s Hidden Hand in ‘Democracy’ Groups. Russia and China recently banned them for operating as foreign agents.

Irrussianality

It’s only propaganda when they do it

Paul Robinson | Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa

David C. Speedie — "Soft Power": The Values that Shape Russian Foreign Policy

In the increasingly frigid environment of U.S.-Russia relations, much attention is given to what may be seen as Russia's strategic "interests." (Of course, much of the policymaking class in the West seems to suggest that Russia is entitled to no "interests" whatsoever.) Of at least equal significance for understanding Russian attitudes, however, is a grasp of the values, the moral framework for Russia's foreign policy.

A valuable resource for this understanding is found in a recent article, "Russia's Orthodox Soft Power," by the University of Rhode Island scholar Nicolai Petro, who explores the "symphonic relationship" between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian state and the manner in which they both utilize the term Russky mir, or Russian World. For the discussion herein of what this entails, we are indebted to Professor Petro.

As Petro observes, the term Russky mir has been wrongly interpreted by some Western analysts as the "perverse intersection" between the Russian state and the Russian Orthodox Church; in reality, the term is employed differently by each party. Where the state uses it as a tool for expanding Russia's cultural and political influence, the Church views it as a spiritual concept linked to God's objective for the rebuilding of a Holy Rus.

The relationship between the two provides a popular and definable framework for Russian foreign policy. Values play a significant role in policy formulation and, throughout modern history, three constants dictate how Russia responds to Western actions: sovereignty, capability to defend that sovereignty, and loyalty to those who share Russia's sense of honor. (The 2014 conflict Ukraine exacerbated the perceived values gap between the West and Russia, yet Russia claims it occupies the higher moral ground by defending its core values of honor in the context of the unique historical, religious, and cultural bonds with Ukraine.)

In summary: The significance of religion in Russian life allows the state to garner huge social capital from having the blessing of the Orthodox Church, and likewise the Church benefits from the relationship by disseminating its message of Christianity worldwide via Russian foreign policy. For the state, Russky Mir is a political/cultural tool for strengthening domestic stability, worldwide status, and influence in neighboring states. For the Church, it is a religious foundation essential for reversing the secularization of society (which it sees as an unwelcome evolution already well underway in the West).…

Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs
"Soft Power": The Values that Shape Russian Foreign Policy

David C. Speedie. director of the Council's program on U.S. Global Engagement

Rob Crawford — The CIA, the President, and the Senate’s Torture Report

Powerful forces on both sides of the partisan divide want the torture issue to disappear altogether. Many military, security and political elites recognize that U.S. torture, approved at the highest levels of government, created an unsurpassed crisis of legitimacy for the country. Their foremost objective is to restore that legitimacy. 

Arguably, this is the principal reason why Obama issued his executive order rejecting torture in 2009 (I believe that McCain would have likely done the same). It is why the new president counseled amnesia about torture and why he refused to initiate criminal investigations or even a commission of inquiry. It is why he has fallen mostly silent about the issue of torture. The U.S. relies on an image that it conducts its wars humanely and in accordance with international law. Brutality and illegality belong to the enemy. 

Occasionally, however, the brutal and unlawful exercise of state violence becomes public knowledge. The inhumanity of violence “shocks the conscience.” Legitimacy crises follow. For the U.S., the Abu Ghraib photos were a disaster but the disaster kept growing with a cascade of revelations that included documentation of torture of prisoners in Guantanamo, Iraq, Afghanistan and CIA kidnapping, renditions, and torture in secret prisons. The reverberations are still being felt 

In 2014, national security elites in both political parties, including those who disagree about the permissibility of “enhanced interrogation,” are worried that the Senate report will further aggravate the prolonged crisis of legitimacy caused by U.S. torture—a crisis made worse by the government’s refusal to undertake criminal proceedings and support civil suits, and partisan politics resulting in continuing indefinite detention at Guantanamo prison camp and military commission trials that admit torture as evidence. Most Americans are still unfamiliar with the grizzly details of what their government authorized and which high officials did the authorizing. Globally, especially in the Middle East, the report will likely reactivate multiple resentments; and it may reinforce dismay among allies.…

For the national security elite as a whole, the history of state violence is better left buried or forgotten and dissident voices about current inhumane operations ignored. Above all, the use of violence as an instrument of policy must remain unencumbered.
For these reasons, even though the CIA will be rebuked by liberal Democrats and perhaps some legislative reforms will be attempted, calls for accountability will continue to be opposed. For national security elites, the release of the Senate report summary will be treated as the end of the story—time to turn the page to narratives more consistent with the myth of American Exceptionalism.  

Counterpunch
The CIA, the President, and the Senate’s Torture Report
Rob Crawford | Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences University of Washington, Tacoma

Brian Sonenstein — Cheney is Confronted About Imprisoned Torture Whistleblower John Kiriakou

Who betrayed their country? The torturers or the whistleblower?

Lynne Cheney replied,

Well I mean I think there is — and the supreme court has wrestled with this too — you’re welcome to believe anything you want to, you’re welcome to say almost anything but what you can’t do is violate national security ordinances that would endanger the country. Edward Snowden is a case in point. I think he’s a traitor and I feel — it’s so — it does not bode well for our society that he’s being valorized for having betrayed his country.

Meanwhile, Dick Cheney — Vice President of the administration that made it an official policy to torture people — sat there in silence thanks to a system that put John Kiriakou in prison for telling the world about it.

FireDogLake
Cheney is Confronted About Imprisoned Torture Whistleblower John Kiriakou
Brian Sonenstein

AmeriKa rules by AmeriKan rules.

Kiss your soft power goodbye.

Also, No One Should Ever Trust Top USA Intelligence Officials in the Obama Administration
by Jon Walker

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied to the American people and more importantly lied directly to Congress during an oversight hearing. Was he punished for this in any way? No.

He was not arrested, censured, or even asked to step down. He is still serving in his position, still going to receive his pension and will likely land a very lucrative job when he finally leaves office. In fact Clapper still has the “full faith” of President Obama.

If a top official in American Intelligence has nothing to fear from lying to Congress while under oath then they definitely have nothing to fear from lying to anyone else.

People are just starting to catch on that there's a hidden agenda and that they are being fed a load of crap by government = corporate America = revolving door, lobbying and bribery campaign finance, largely through the media?

Things ot be aware of: Noopolitik

In political science Noopolitik from the Greek Noos (knowledge) and German Politik (politics) is the network-based geopolitics of knowledge. The term was invented by defense experts John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt in a seminal RAND corporation study of 1999 and often appears in connection with that of smart power.

Noopolitics is an informational strategy of manipulating international processes through the forming in general public by means of mass media of positive or negative attitude to external or internal policy of a state of block of states to create a positive or negative image of ideas and promulgated moral values...

While the term initially appeared in association with the concept of the US Revolution in Military Affairs, Noopolitik has also come to describe an interest in theKnowledge Economy and in particular innovation and R&D to leverage growth and political reach in international relations. Thus Noopolitik may be defined as the use of innovation and knowledge to leverage political intercourses by other means at the international level. Such "knowledge race" may be either a means of asserting political independence or of generating a sudden gap in the geopolitical balance of power.... 

Professor Li Xiguang of Tsinghua University described the stakes of Smart power for the People's Republic of China in a 2010 article on Noopolitik in the Global Times 

Soft power is the power of making people love you. Hard power is the ability to making people fear you. Over the last 500 years, all the world powers gained their hegemony through hard power, but the US has gained its hegemony through combining hard power and soft power, both striking at and assimilating its opponents.

The US has built its soft power by making its values and political system, such as the US interpretation and definition of democracy, freedom and human rights, into supposedly universal values.

Innovation war.

Emphasizing China’s deeply-rooted desire for technological independence, Segal refers to the PRC’s efforts as an “Innovation Wall,” which is the willingness to innovate as independently as possible from the rest of the world to simply and systematically leap ahead of any other country. Needless to say, the scope of the rising fog of war in world economic and R&D competition is particularly daunting for the Euro-Atlantic community. The Chinese phrase for national innovation zizhu chuangxin was notably coined in a 2006 state report titled “Guidelines on National Medium- and Long-Term Program for Science and Technology Development.” If China decides to foster an innovation of its own, and the ideas were published in Mandarin language journals it would provide a barrier against other linguistic communities, and a thicker fog of war might rise in knowledge-based economic warfare.

Noopolitik
Wikipedia

Matthew Schofield — Europeans agog at Americans’ inability to compromise, aghast at likely long-term impact

American soft power crumbling?

McClatchyDC
Europeans agog at Americans’ inability to compromise, aghast at likely long-term impact
Matthew Schofield — McClatchy Foreign Staff

Michael McAuliff — How The Government Shutdown Will End: 'The Market Is Just Going to Smash Us'

"I'm apprehensive that we're looking at at least a couple of weeks until we bump up against the debt ceiling and the market is an outside force that pistol whips us into our senses," said Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.), who has already begun preparing for the showdown by circulating a letter -- with nearly all the Democrats signing on -- calling for a clean raising of the limit.

However, Welch was not sure even presenting a unified front would move Republicans -- including those who are sympathetic.

"Ultimately what will get them to move is the market reaction. The market is just going to smash us for our congressional abstinence," he said. "At that point they'll cave. And Boehner knows that."...

"If we default, that will be a signal that we've gone from dysfunction to disintegration," he said. "I talk to lots of my Republican colleagues and friends and they're dismayed." 

The Huffington Post
How The Government Shutdown Will End: 'The Market Is Just Going to Smash Us'
Michael McAuliff

US soft power is already eroding. A default, even very temporary, would finish it. It would basically be a very public announcement that the US is turning its back on world leadership.

Mike Whitney — The True State of the Economy

At the same time the corporations and banks are reporting record profits, Gallup surveys show that “trust in all three branches of the federal government remains on the lower end of what Gallup has measured historically” while “Americans’ trust in banks fell to an all-time low of 18% — lower than its level at the height of the global financial collapse.” (Gallup)

So, there is a tradeoff for all the loot Obama’s friends have been pilfering from working people, and that tradeoff is trust. Americans no longer have confidence in the government, the market or the justice system. Gradually, that lack of trust will cross-over into the economy as wary consumers set aside more of their earnings to protect themselves from the government-corporate-racketeer oligarchy. A slowdown in personal consumption will impact retail sales, durable goods, hiring and capital investment. It will douse those green shoots with motor oil and push the economy back into negative territory.

Counterpunch
The True State of the Economy
Mike Whitney

The "confidence fairy" isn't a total myth. Trust in government does count socially, politically and economically.

Obama has been a disaster that has been magnified by GOP obstructionism. Luckily, the obstructionism has at least prevented the Grand Bargain that Obama is seeking to cement his legacy as a Very Serious Person that cut entitlements and balanced the budget, in emulation of Bill Clinton's policy of triangulation.

AFP — World increasingly believes China will become the top superpower: Pew poll

"American exceptionalism" on the way out?

What is developing is a "clash of civilizations" — Western, typified by America, Chinese, Indian, and Islamic. Furthermore, the Western model is bifurcated into East and West, roughly along the traditional lines of Roman and Eastern Orthodox Christianity after the parting of the ways in the eleventh century. Russia is still not part of Europe and sits between the West and China. Key here is control of Central Asian resources.

How this is going to play out in the process of globalization that will occupy stage center for most of this century and probably beyond is unclear. What seems to be clearer as the plot deepens, however, is that the Western model is not going to dominate in the way many previously assumed.

Whether the future will bring a multipolar world or global hegemony by a sole superpower is still to be determined. The US is presently committed to retaining hegemony at all costs.

The Raw Story

World increasingly believes China will become the top superpower: Pew poll

Agence France-Presse

Al Jazeera — Outrage over Morales' plane diversion

Latin American leaders express outrage after plane carrying Bolivian president forced to land by European countries.

Al Jazeera
Outrage over Morales' plane diversion

Edward Snowden is bringing US soft power to an inglorious end. The veil is lifted and the emperor not only is without clothes but also has feet of clay.

John Quincy Adams — What has America done for the benefit of mankind?

And now, friends and countrymen, if the wise and learned philosophers of the older world, the first observers of mutation and aberration, the discoverers of maddening ether and invisible planets, the inventors of Congreve rockets and shrapnel shells, should find their hearts disposed to inquire, what has America done for the benefit of mankind? let our answer be this--America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government. America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity. She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, equal justice, and equal rights. She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the inde-pendence of other nations, while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when the conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama, the European World, will be contests between inveterate power, and emerging right. Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause, by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet upon her brows would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world: she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.

Speech on Independence Day (excerpt)

John Quincy Adams

July 4, 1821

United States House of Representatives

(h/t The Rombach Report in the comments)